If we as humanity cannot protect fields like art, science, even healthcare and housing, from the ever-growing pressure to make a profit off of them, then we are truly doomed. AI is not the sole cause, it just expedites the process of destroying everything that is not maximally cost-effective.
I'm inclined to agree that a loty if not most of human knowledge is "a very good working hypothesis" at best. But LLMs are also trained on that. There is nothing inherent to them that makes them see the world for what it "really" is. AI introduces its own filter, it also approximates reality. If it could help us process complexity better, I don't know. It might be worth exploring.
And yet, biology and chemistry researchers still exist and they still ask questions we might never get an answer to. Such is science. If humanity had only ever done things that had a guaranteed result, many things would have never been invented or discovered.
There is a difference between formulating a hypothesis based on observations and treating it as true. As I understood it, things that are not proven yet will not be used to formally prove other things.
You are purposefully misconstructing what I said to mean "humans only need to feel special". Obviously they need more than that. Your reply is just mean-spirited for no reason.
Thing is that people don't want to be "freed up" from their comfortable, high-paying jobs. Because then they likely need to return to metaphorical toiling in the field.
It could be that there are more companies though, companies that couldn't afford a large team before. Now they can start delivering value with just, say, 3 people, making the business worthwhile. At least that's one optimistic scenario.
Humans are not inherently special by some law of the universe, but a society that doesn't consider humans special is a pretty shitty society for a human to live in. We don't have to surrender to the fact that humans are just tiny, unimportant specks of dust in the galaxy. We can assign meaning to stuff despite that, and it's what we've been doing for our whole existence. Of course one can always find new meaning, but attacking the foundation of all meaning of human life does feel pretty severe. And to me, AI accelerationists sound pseudo-religious, too. They're either enamored with doomsday scenarios or the idea of living in endless abundance, both are pretty much magical thinking.
I'd assume that theoretical math prides itself in trying to be as close to pure logic as it gets. It has very little, if any empirical elements (at least that's what it looks like to me). And I understand the value in trying to preserve that pure logic element. In the end, biology is just chemistry, chemistry is just physics, and physics is just math. If you feel like your profession is the bedrock of all other science, it probably feels weird to shake its theoretical foundation.
For math, you don't really have empirical data though. There is no trial you can do to find out whether, statistically, the proof works as intended. Because pure theoretical math rarely produces a measurable result.
I don't see why these things should be mutually exclusive. You can start prescribing the drug (= working with the AI-generated math proofs) while still trying to understand how it works exactly. Because the explanation might prove invaluable. I don't think anyone would be object to using an AI-proven theorem to further their work if it helps, but a scientist would surely object to the notion that we should just stop working towards understanding. Asking "but why though" is literally a scientist's job.
No idea what you're on about. It is provable that humans developed LLMs, there is no proof that God created humans. It's possible that a human creation will someday be more capable and intelligent than humans on all fronts, but it still stands that without the foundation of human intellect, there would be no LLMs. So I don't understand people who act like "AI" is a separate species that came to exist independently and proves human inferiority, that humans need to accept that they're not special, and that we should rush to submit to our new AI overlords. If anything, the existence and capabilities of AI proves that human intellect is still impressive and versatile, because it is a direct reflection of human knowledge.
If human intelligence is so boring and non-special, how exactly did LLMs get this smart? Is it not from a) being developed by humans and b) being fed a very large portion of all human-generated text?
Without the human intellect to emulate, LLMs would be nothing.
Exactly. That is also why I believe that megacorps should pay an "AI/infrastructure tax" of some sort. Want to use up electricity and water, buy up all the hardware, make workes obsolete? Pay up. Give back to the very society you exploit.
Actually, yes. Even though you tried to make it sound ridiculous. I want to move towards a world where the worth of a person (and their thoughts, feelings, etc.) is not measured by an exclusive standard of "intelligence", especially if that standard is created/enforced by mega-corporations.
"Easing the pain" is the foundation of many of today's problems. It's gotten too easy to avoid discomfort and effort. Also, if we are talking about disabilities, maybe we should start respecting different forms of communication instead of enabling people to "write" in a way that is not authentic to them at all, just so they can seem "normal".
I wouldn't have a problem with working off the fruits of other people's labor because most of us are essentially doing that everyday anyway, the issue is that big tech companies (want to) reap all the benefit and create profit from something that should be accessible to everyone. Everything is getting privatized -- housing, water, electricity, and now, thinking and knowledge. We are heading towards a world where you have to pay even more excessive fees just for existing and for completing any basic task.
> "a worker" is a very very non deterministic abstraction, outside from the most basic tasks
Sure but we (usually) don't fool ourselves into believing otherwise. The problem with AI is that it suggests near-perfect intelligence with reproducible results. So many people are not acknowledging the fundamental limitations of LLMs, whereas we all have an intuition for the limitations of humans.
Some people cannot be convinced of this, but some can, as long as you don't use technical language to describe the issue. Essentially, instead of saying "we need to prevent technical debt and have a maintainable software architecture" one needs to say stuff like "software quality enables a faster time-to-market for new features and less customer churn". i.e. put it in business-y terms.
Of course customers do not care about code quality in and of itself. Just like they don't inherently care about the type of seam used for a garment. But they do care if their clothes fall apart after two washes. People care if software is buggy or slow or becomes harder to use or more expensive over time. And the way we know how to mitigate that is by ensuring code quality (it's definitely not the only factor, but an important one).
Well, almost all scientific domains have developed a form of structured and formal language, because natural language is too ambiguous. There's "code" everywhere, not just in programming.
Imagine what human researchers could have done with 10 millions... Maybe it wouldn't have been as fast, but I'm sure it would have created more usable knowledge because the work done by humans is usually more digestible to other humans.
I hate products that want me to find a use-case for their feature that they wanted to develop. It's great that some people love AI features, but for me, they are rarely solving an actual problem I have. But now I have to relearn the software because the company wants to go all-in on AI? Why should I? One example of that is Notion. I've loved it for years, and I'm still using it, but it's starting to lean heavier and heavier into an AI-first workflow and I don't like it to the point where I consider switching to something else regularly.